Monday, 17 October 2011

When I win the lottery ...

Added bonus: A proper greengrocer on Caledonian Rd, the fruit and veg
not in stupid plastic bowls. Pomegranites 49p. What a full service I offer.

Negative: Someone said recently that I wasn’t having much luck on this
blog lately. And so it continues.

I used the walk down
from Caledonian Rd tube station to contemplate bacon sandwiches and freedom, as
the road goes past Pentonville Prison, and the café opposite it – The Break
Out, ha ha - smelled deliciously fried baconly greasy. And maybe because I’d walked past the high-up tiny-paned
grime-covered windows of the jail, my first thought as I saw Cally Pool was
that it would be the perfect location for exterior shots for a TV drama set in
an asylum seekers detention centre. The building equivalent of a body-double.

In reception, the open
entrance to the men’s changing room seems practically on the street, and you
can see the learner pool immediately. A school party was coming in behind me,
but I felt relaxed, they would be in that pool, not mine. I went through to change, and my heart,
that had sunk at the horrible blue corrugated box exterior, sank a bit more.

Down the middle of this
grotty room was a row of red metal hooks and dark wood benches that must have
been here for years. I expect they pre-date the pool. I expect they existed
first, and people thought ‘what facility shall we build round this handy metal
hook/bench combo?’ The answer must
have been ‘whatever we do, let’s make it glum’. To either side are lockers and
a few cubicles, the ceiling like a white metal colander with special
dust-collecting abilities. I
started to change as the school party came in. Now I know how a naked adult
woman can embarrass 10/11-year old girls, it happens regularly in my house with
my own daughter, so I tried to be discreet, but failed. The teacher chivvied
them along, her eyes firmly fixed on the lottery ticket she was filling in as
she sporadically yelled ‘Come on girls. Moooooove’. Not sure she was setting
them much of an example, filling in a lottery ticket. Christ, the message was,
give me three numbers and I’m out of here.

Oh. Disappointingly, the
girls followed me poolside. There were lessons in the main pool while the
learner pool remained peacefully empty. There was only one wide lane left for
public swimming. (Two actually, I discovered. The middle one said ‘swimming
lessons’, but it wasn’t. I could have gone in there, but that would have taken
me nearer the noise and splashing source and I was happier clinging to the
opposite edge.) I should add at this point that I’d lost my normal goggles, so
was wearing my oversized tinted goggles that would be better for skiing. I did,
it must be said, look like a twat. Care? Not I.

The room is dingily
decorated in beige and maroon. I haven’t seen maroon for some years, but am
enjoying saying the word out loud. (It was definitely maroon and not plum or
aubergine. I checked, without my dark goggles on.) Maroon and beige is not an
enlivening colour combination. It was popular in the 70s, but so were Findus Crispy
Pancakes, and we have all since had our fill and politely moved on. There’s a
dark glass box to one side,
decorated with blue sticky-back plastic figures in various poses that
hint it’s either a gym or there was some funny contortion business going on. The roof is humped and corrugated, two long windows running
the length, and two fluorescent light strips meanly glowing dark candle yellow.
There’s a thin window, too, running right round, just under the ceiling letting
in a flicker of sunlight and giving a view on to the top of the Caledonian Rd
tree.

The pool is 25m long,
half as wide and I knew it was 28 degrees because a digital display in
reception told me so. There’s no deep end, just a dip in the middle, but even
then, well within my depth. The water is opaque, a little chalky in its
whiteness; I’m not worried about the sand on the bottom as someone on this blog
kindly told me about filtration systems. Hot and cloudy is about the opposite
of what I like. And I’m distracted today, thinking about a work thing I was
waiting to hear about (it didn’t come off). Sometimes I feel that heat
slows me down, I suspect physiologically that’s wrong, but something did slow me
down today, probably incipient disappointment. Fortunately the one lane I was in lovely and wide, enough
for the big guy knocking at my heels to overtake easily.

Into the shower, a
shabby affair that someone has tried to brighten with a job lot of cheap shower curtains patterned with
faded blues and flowers; they reminded me of the skirted costumes the older
Jamaican women at Clapham Manor pool used to wear for their aquarobics. I used
to moan about that pool, til it went. I wonder where those ladies bob around
now?